A female colleague came into my office recently and shoved an open tin of something under my nose and told me to take a whiff.

“Smell this! It’s amazing,” she said, excitedly. I should say here that the two of us both like to cook, and occasionally share recipes, so discussing the merits of various foods and ingredients isn’t unusual for us.

“Yeah, so? It’s rooibos tea,” I replied, with what clearly was a less-than-appropriate level of wonderment.

“But smell it! It’s chocolate-mint rooibos! Isn’t it amazing!” she continued, pointing to what I then saw were tiny chocolate chips floating in a sea of what looked like minced red twigs.

“Ahhhh . . . OK,” I said. “But I might point out here that if you like mint chocolate, you could just eat some, and not ruin it by mixing it with the ground up bark of some weird South African shrubbery passing itself off as tea. Aren’t those guys making enough money selling gold and diamonds, without inflicting rooibos on an unsuspecting world?”

This prompted a chuckle as she marched off, presumably to boil water.

Now look. I’ll admit that when I was a young university student, I experimented briefly with herbs. For a time, I developed a fairly serious Sleepytime habit that led, inevitably, as we’re all warned, to the hard stuff.

Before I knew it, I was ingesting peppermint, rosehips and even more intense citrus-based brews imported from mysterious, far-flung corners of Asia. Such became the depth of my addiction, I once even tried something called Bengal Spice when I was offered some at a party without even asking what was in it. Bengal Spice? It could have been made from tigers, for all I knew — or cared.

It was my grandmother who saved me one evening when I arrived on her doorstep, cold and shivering, on a typical Vancouver winter night.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gordon, why aren’t you wearing a coat in this rain?” she said, bringing me into her cozy little bungalow before saying those magic words: “I’ll put on the kettle.”

Soon, she placed a steaming cup before me filled with a delicious milky beige fluid. I took a sip. “What is this?” I asked, taking another rapturous slurp.

While I’ve relapsed from time to time, mostly with mint while under the weather, from that day on, thanks to Grandma, I became a recovering herbaholic.

But, I gotta tell ya, it ain’t easy.

Herbal-tea pushers are everywhere these days. Throughout my neighbourhood of Kitsilano — and this will hardly shock anyone — herb shops seem to be springing up on every corner. You may laugh, but you won’t think it’s funny when one of your teenagers comes home and confesses that some guy named David sold him a bag of something called goji pop, bear trap or midsummer night’s dream.

In our house, in the evening after supper, someone often yells to me from the kitchen whether I’d like tea, followed quickly by, “What kind of tea?”

It’s unclear why they ask, perhaps just to torment me, because my answer is always the same: “There is only one kind of tea. It’s called tea! It’s made from a plant called the tea plant.”

“OK, but we’re having lemon-ginger, if you want to try it.”

The latest herbal-tea craze I blame on women and a few aging dudes we once called sensitive new age men. Let’s face it, you won’t find too many real men slurping down cups of tinted hot water the general colour and aroma of straw. Real men, harrumph, drink coffee, or real tea if they must drink tea, not some terribly tart tisane involving dehydrated mango or banana chips.

A lot of this has to do, I believe, with the unstated but none-too-subtle hypochondria that underlies modern female sensibilities. Go into one of the new-age tea shops and you’re sure to find a lineup of fit young women in yoga pants, some 70 or even 80 years from their graves, ordering potions involving green tea or rooibos to ensure they get life-extending “antioxidants.” What? Are they rusting inside?

All these health claims, naturally — and I suppose some are true — are made by the tea producers. Tetley, for instance, told Vancouver tea drinkers last week that its green teas increase a person’s “hydration” — $10 word that means you drank water — and that they are packed with “flavonoids.” Thanks, Alex, but I’ll take “flavour,” instead, for $800.

Some people like all these weird teas, and it’s not my place to tell anyone what to imbibe. But if you’re drinking them to prolong or improve your life, consider a 13-year study of 83,269 Japanese folks published last week in Stroke, a journal of the American Heart Association. It found that drinking at least one cup of coffee a day had the same effect as green tea at reducing the risk of strokes. (Both lowered the risk by 20 per cent.)

After a lifetime of research, my own evidence-based findings are this: your chance of dying, whether or not you drink herbal tea with or without acai, goji or Franken berries, is 100 per cent. So take that, rooibos. I’m sticking with my Joe.

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the “X” in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.